kundera: unbearable lightness

“Must it be? It must be! It must be!” Beethoven

…he realized it was only a matter of chance that Tereza loved him and not his friend Z.

…There were, in the realm of possibility, an infinite number of unconsummated loves for other men. (34)

Vertigo…something other than the fear of falling…the voice of the emptiness below us, which tempts and lures us. It is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves. (60)

“I’ll undress them for you, give them a bath, bring them in to you…” she would whisper to him as they pressed together. She yearned for the two of them to merge into a hermaphrodite. Then the other women’s bodies would be their plaything. (62)

…doing a stranger’s bidding is a special madness. (66)

She had never been ambitious out of vanity. All she had ever wanted was to escape from her mother’s world. Yes, she saw it with absolute clarity: no matter how enthusiastic she was about taking pictures, she could just as easily have turned her enthusiasm to any endeavor. Photography was nothing but a way of getting at “something higher” and living beside Tomas. (70)

In spite of their love, they had made each other’s life a hell. The fact that they loved each other was merely proof that the fault lay not in themselves, in their behavior or inconstancy of feeling, but rather in their incompatibility: he was strong and she was weak…But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave. (75)

While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and exchange motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them. (89)

“Noise has an advantage. It drowns out words.” And suddenly he realized that all his life he had done nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct sentences, search for formulations and amend them, so in the end no words were precise, their meanings were obliterated, their content lost, they turned into trash, chaff, dust, sand; prowling through his brain, tearing at his head, they were his insomnia, his illness. (94)

At the moment he penetrated Sabina, however, he closed his eyes. The pleasure of suffusing his body called for darkness. That darkness was pure, perfect, thoughtless, visionless; that darkness was without end, without borders; that darkness was the infinite we carry within us (Yes, if you’re looking for infinity, just close your eyes!) (95)

Excerpts from “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”
by Milan Kundera